"Their innocence, in my opinion, is incoculture" - interview with prof. dr. dr. arh. Mihail Caffe

Françoise Pamfil: The first question is about how you decided to do Architecture.

Mihail Caffe: It's quite an interesting story, in the last years of high school I was prepared for a very hard exam in Medicine, I had read I don't know how many medical and physiology treatises and I was set on Medicine. I had an uncle who was a doctor, who loved me very much and had somehow raised me in Bucharest, because my parents lived in the provinces, and when he heard that I wanted to go to Medicine he said to me: "You, Medicine, what are you doing in Medicine? You should become an architect, what do you mean, with your talent!" (I used to draw well when I was a kid), and that's how I became an architect thanks to a doctor who advised me to go into medicine - it's a kind of anecdote, but it's very true. Only that I couldn't do architecture as soon as I finished high school, because it was in '42 and I wasn't attracted by some private forms of education of the Jewish community, which had schools of architecture run by the architect Stern - who was also dean here in '52-'53. I don't know why I didn't trust these so-called private schools. So I went to a painting school to do something, and I did two years of painting with Maxy, the great M. H. Maxy. And doing painting, I was colleagues with a lot of people who later became quite well known in art...

F.P.: At that time Mr. Maxy was ...

M.C.: Mr. Maxy was the head of the class of one of those painting schools, still Jewish, still of the Jewish community, because that was the situation then, there was Beate Fredanov who was in charge of the Dramatic Art Section, Maxy who was in charge of Painting, and there was I don't know who else for Music. We were a kind of Conservatory of Arts. We in the Painting Department worked with the Theater Department, we did scenography and so on, and when the School of Architecture opened for us in 1944, I took the exam and I was the last on the list, not being at all prepared for the Architectural entrance exam, I had no idea how to hold a shooter.

F.P.: And who was your first studio teacher?

M.C.: My first studio teacher was Nenciulescu, and assistant - Macovei.

F.P.: Your diploma thesis was on...

M.C.: My diploma thesis was about the Romanian Academy Palace, which was a very pretentious work of monumental architecture, in the period of Socialist Realism - it had a lot of Renaissance elements and some elements of Romanian architecture, slipped in between. But the funniest thing was that the president of the diploma committee was Duiliu Marcu, who had in his portfolio the project for the Academy Palace.

F.P.: He was all ready...

M.C.:...it was ready made by him, and he looked at my project with curiosity and irony, which was exactly ... not like his, because I didn't know it at the time, I hadn't done enough research...

F.P.: This was happening in...

M.C.:...in '50.

F.P.: Among your classmates, who was the most picturesque character?

M.C.: The most picturesque character was a boy who fell very early, I don't know if it wasn't in the first few years after I finished college... His name was Bob Bertholy, he was a very nice guy, and he was also a friend and teamed up in the crazy things that were done with Sică Baroi, who became a graphic designer and was very talented - he even did the graphics for my book on an album about Romanian architecture published in '56 - '57.

F.P.: As regards the monograph published in 1960 on Mincu, do you feel the opportunity of a reedition?

M.C.: In fact, Mrs. Gabrea, who runs Capitel Publishing House, has been talking to me for two years about a reedition for the Mincu centenary last year, and it has not been completed. I thought it would be interesting to have it reissued, although, on re-reading it, I was ashamed of some of the stupid things I said there.

F.P.: You are very modest, because your critical apparatus, but also certain comments about, for example, the "Pompeian red" of the Girls' School and other things are very interesting, it is not a false compliment, it is a work that has a certain consistency and that gives a key to reading a monograph. That's why I asked you about the reissue, because there is a need for works of high quality in the monographic field.

M.C.: I am more satisfied with the smaller monograph that Meridiane Publishing House published in the '70s, which is my pure intervention, without any editorial additions, whereas the book of the '60s is half literature by the book editor Alexandru Sen of that publishing house, who dictated to me whole passages of novelized literarization of actions, past times, present times, now he does, now he goes... in short, Mr. Sen was a very talented boy...

F.P.: I know that the monograph was first published in '60, and then republished, but I didn't know about this Mr. Alexandru Sen...

M.C.: I had started with a professional monograph, an architectural commentary, the idea being to use the book to provide a bit of general architectural knowledge for a young reader, but he introduced elements of romanticization that were totally foreign to me. In the end the result was a kind of biographical novel, which is sometimes embarrassing, but that was the situation. Now, on the occasion of the re-edition, I asked myself whether to rewrite the text or to leave it intact, in the end I stuck to the idea of leaving it intact, as a document, and to make a preface to the edition with a commentary on its position, but nothing has been done so far.

F.P.: Still on the subject of books, you published the work Contemporary Housing in '87, do you think that the subject of housing needs a greater density of written commentary? Do we have critics?

M.C.: I think we do; I think we don't. I mean, I have the impression that our architectural literature is focused, in my opinion, disproportionately on the formal-spatial and not on the social-anthropological aspects of housing. That is to say, the approach to housing as a human phenomenon is very little treated, in fact, or what interested me was mainly this, because architectural acrobatics in terms of housing... it's no wonder.

F.P.: How can architecture schools shift the focus and design energy from pragmatic to ethical territory? What would be the good fairy or the magic ingredient that would get people to add this ethical dimension to the idea that an architect makes a dwelling as a response to society, to human problems?

M.C.: I think that such a thing is due to people.

F.P.: I understand. Are you optimistic?

M.C.: Yes, very optimistic.

F.P.: That there are enough people to generate a...?

M.C.: No, an infusion has to be made from outside the profession, that is, if anthropologists, psychologists and so on were to come to such courses or conferences, it would be very interesting because this ethical dimension you're talking about, architects are rather strangers to it, they do it intuitively, whereas an anthropologist, a specialist, even a Heideggerian if you like, this problem of place we hunt around like this.... as a kind of poetic marvel, but in fact, there is a truth in this, which I think anthropologists master better than architects. So if it were decided in schools of architecture to give courses in the anthropology of housing, the psychology of housing, the problem of the relationship between the private and the social and so on, and the public and the public space, there is a lot that could be brought here to make these children understand that it is not enough to put lines next to each other and to take a little project, but to think about what is going on inside, from the perspective of the user, the living, or they don't have that, they don't have this "approach".

F.P.: In your opinion, has collective housing in Romania mutilated or altered an alternative to the dream of living? How would you diagnose things?

M.C.: I am very reserved. Collective housing in Romania, first of all, is not the invention of communism, housing in blocks of flats is a modern invention that has nothing to do with ideologies or political systems.

F.P.: It has to do with density...

M.C.: It has to do with density, with the constitution of society, with the transition of architecture from individual to social use. So what can I say, collective housing is an objective fact, there's nothing we can do about it. How it was resolved in the 60s and 80s is a matter of political and economic conjuncture, because what they say about communist housing - prisons, matchboxes and so on - we find in HLMs, we find in the buildings in Milan or Florence, in the big Italian cities, on the outskirts. I saw in Naples an awful housing development, with laundry and troughs in the balconies, so that's not the problem, it was a very complicated bet, at one point you are told "we have to cram millions of people into housing". How do you do it? It was the question of choosing between comfortable and little or a lot and more uncomfortable, it was the choice of a lot, not good, it was the quantitative criterion that determined these shapes that came out. Today, I still think that if these apartments were inhabited by two or three people less than they are, it would be ok, a three-room apartment for two people, whether it's from the 70s or the 90s, can still work very well today. Of course there are some data that are a bit coercive, the utilitarian equipment of the dwelling is reduced to the most modest expression, and you can't change this even if you reduce the density of occupancy, but these are the ones, they are already 40-50 years old, they could be demolished, why bother with refurbishing and repainting the outside.

F.P.: Changing the subject, I would like to invite you to comment on whether or not you think there is a chance to continue a modern Romanian architecture. The question contains a nostalgia, that there are certain countries where modernism and neo-modernism, thanks to a school of thought, are settling down. What is happening in Romania is a huge chasm, why the modern theme has or has not adequacy not in form, but in social and anthropological thinking. Are there continuators of modern architecture in Romania?

M.C.: Do you call modern architecture the interwar architecture of the 1930s and 1940s?

F.P.: Yes, the architecture of the '20s to the '40s.

M.C.: Maybe it exists, but I wouldn't be able to name who, maybe Teacă, maybe Beldiman, even Dorin Ștefan, I don't know exactly what some of my young colleagues have done. I have an admiration for these people whom I have mentioned, because they carry out an honest and, albeit topical, profession, albeit with some of the same qualities that are somehow linked to the inter-war modernism of which you speak. But I still have the impression that this advertising mirage, let's say, is very active among younger and less young architects for whom commercial competition is very fierce and they want to strike blows everywhere, everywhere they try to strike blows.

F.P.: What do you think about the fact that certain young architects are seduced or very influenced by certain images of buildings that exist in the world and, with a certain candour or innocence, they replicate them in Labor Square, in...

M.C.: Well, that's what I was talking about, this innocence which, in my opinion, is incoculture.

F.P.: And what should an architectural magazine do, for example, to comment on superiority? Is there a remedy? So, apart from the fact that the man is not cultured, that's his problem, on the other side, so if there is no reaction from the author, society - we don't have an architectural public, we don't have an architectural culture - who should intervene, what would be a little pill of remedy, like in homeopathy?

M.C.: A real architectural criticism. Because, in our country, architectural criticism is at the level of high theories, in my opinion, at the level of commenting on current trends and so on, but we don't have an architectural criticism on the subject, as Mumford used to do, although Mrs. Tomașevschi did a doctoral thesis on architectural criticism. But she doesn't do architectural criticism - your magazine - she does theory, essays, but someone who takes two or three houses and analyzes them, as an architect, not as a journalist, I think that would be the first step, a real architectural criticism. If you show me an article of true architectural criticism, I'm ready to say "I was wrong", but I didn't perceive an article of architectural criticism. It's either dry, descriptive presentations without any kind of core...

F.P.: The welcoming chronicle, here's a house, it's four volumes...

M.C.: So an architectural criticism, that would be the first step, but architectural criticism is hard to do, because it means to minimize some susceptibilities, not to minimize susceptibilities and so on. In general, architects are quite proud and sensitive to... whatever...

F.P.: I have another question from this point of view. In an ideal scenario, in which you would have the freedom to form an architecture faculty, what would be the essential ingredients.

M.C.: I would say so - a solid historical-theoretical professional culture - it seems to me that these theoretical disciplines should be merged, that architectural history and architectural theory should no longer be done separately, but that a theoretical history of architecture should be done, simply, without factology, and with a theoretical commentary on historical development, which we don't have, because in history we make point-by-point enumerations, and in theory we make generalizations. I would be interested in a theoretically annotated history of architecture as part of this basic cultural background of architects. That would be the first part, the second part - the design part should be more analytical, less of a "multi-purpose attempt" of all kinds of themes, and the subject of the themes should be on theoretical issues and not on building types.

And there would be something else, I think, very interesting, an education in spatial-architectural thinking, including Structures courses, something à la Cișmigiu.